alt.hn

7/12/2026 at 11:09:42 AM

Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/11/old-and-new-apps-via-modern-coding-agents/

by subset

7/12/2026 at 1:43:26 PM

Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes:

https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza...

Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have.

To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude:

https://bdp.cs.montana.edu/

by recursivedoubts

7/12/2026 at 3:32:17 PM

Using LLMs to build out the nice-to-haves that I’ve always wanted but never had time for is one of their great use cases. Visualizations are a perfect use case for this because they don’t have to be perfectly architected, maintainable code. Getting to the correct visual output is good enough, and LLMs excel at iterating something until it looks right.

by Aurornis

7/12/2026 at 4:48:10 PM

I agree that visualization does not need to be perfect. One issue is that "correct visual output" depends on your expertise level. A visualization that is good to teach undergrads may be frustratingly bad to experts and researchers. Standards like "looking right" depend on the audience's ability to spot nuances and how focused they are on the fine details. If you want a visualization to work for the range of people from beginners to experts, you do need to focus a bit more on what it means for something to "look right" for multiple audiences, since the errors in the fine details may hinder a visualization's usefulness for more advanced audiences.

by atrettel

7/12/2026 at 6:11:39 PM

What format do you have it build? PNG? Svg? Open document drawing? I am interested.

by the__alchemist

7/13/2026 at 12:39:08 AM

I mostly use HTML, but it is much more flexible than what you would assume if you leverage some standard formats instead of building everything from scratch.

Mermaid, Graphviz and friends but in HTML pages.

Sometimes it is turning other things into perfetto.dev format for multi-machine tracking (like turn a build process into the same format as Chrome traces).

If you need more flexibility, you end up reaching for p5.js and three js (rather, tell the model to use it).

Once you're touching distance from WebGL, the equivalent of something you make can start looking like something from ciechanow.ski over a single weekend.

by gopalv

7/13/2026 at 1:18:17 PM

Ty v much! I gill give those a shot. I just yoloed one using D2 after brief research. Will keep exploring those.

What is your thought on D2 compared to those? GIven the WebGL mention (The one I'm familiar with), I suspect this is a matter of interactive vs static/diagrams. I assume the latter due to my own project which falls in that category!

by the__alchemist

7/12/2026 at 4:05:55 PM

I've been using LLMs to create visualizations for math papers I come across. Prompting "Create a visualization for each segment of this article in the style of a 3 brown 1 blue video using manim." has yielded impressive results.

It helps me digest the content faster and allows me to read more articles than I otherwise would.

by chorsestudios

7/12/2026 at 4:31:01 PM

LLMs to create and revise PIL (python image library) commands/params have saved me HOURs.

by fantasizr

7/12/2026 at 4:33:37 PM

Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/

Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?

by acbart

7/12/2026 at 6:51:06 PM

What an odd bit to latch onto. What ratio would you find more appropriate?

by wild_egg

7/13/2026 at 1:47:55 AM

I mean, did you read the linked article?

by acbart

7/12/2026 at 10:24:18 PM

That's not me, but I do weight 50/50.

My experience is that no students get a C- except for students who blow the first part of the class and try to work back. I usually work a deal out with them anyway.

by recursivedoubts

7/12/2026 at 3:28:00 PM

This is v cool.

When I did my microcontroller class with lecturer hand drawing an 8-bit computer, the registers, memory, instructions on the white board, it was v cool to understand how things worked under the hood.

Wondered if someone could make more simulations for what was being taught. Teaching is about deciphering a thing into it's components and seeing how they interact. Vibe coded simulations are a great tool for that.

by nojvek

7/12/2026 at 11:56:14 AM

Terry Tao using coding agents to build apps means we're one step away from a Fields Medalist asking an LLM why his Docker container won't start, just like the rest of us.

by luciana1u

7/12/2026 at 1:42:35 PM

I'm waiting for the reverse, coding agents asking Terry Tao if the proof they plan working on is worthy of a Fields Medal

by dist-epoch

7/12/2026 at 12:37:26 PM

This is a very humbling thought, thank you.

by skinfaxi

7/12/2026 at 4:34:00 PM

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games.

And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do.

The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more.

We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drastically.

by echelon

7/12/2026 at 5:12:29 PM

Every time I wrote software that I was personally motivated to have and kept at it until it reached a comfortable equilibrium of utility, scope, and quality and then stopped? No one paid me.

Every time someone paid me to write software it was some combination of 1. not that interesting of a problem 2. no real utility i could see or touch, useful in some abstract way of making a number go up 3. involved a constant, painful maintenance burden 4. involved incident management of one kind or another 5. involved a long tail of details with no unifying principle other than a lot of implicit legacy constraints and stakeholders whose involvement waxed and waned with no seeming rhythm..

I'm a big fan of the new capability, it opens up new regimes of performance and correctness and capability for what I can achieve, that in turn grinds me up against math and theory that I had thus far been able to avoid, it's pushing me up the ambition ladder hard and that's a good thing.

But the change is a change in degree not in kind at least in the vibecode regime: it was always relatively fun and relatively easy to do one small program with modest requirements around defect rigor that had a big legible "oh cool!" surface that I didn't have to maintain. Fable doesn't seem any better than Opus at grinding detail work in the bowels of a compiler, but it sure can make an iPhone-scoped platform game with a bunch of bugs in it in a single shot?

If there's a job where you get paid for doing fun, high defect, "oh wow!" factor one-off software that you can immediately disavow any responsibility for? Fuck man, I should have had that job before Fable got that job.

by reinitctxoffset

7/12/2026 at 6:16:18 PM

The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless

by superb_dev

7/12/2026 at 6:29:47 PM

In my very small business, the supply of software has gone up (I'm building things), and they're custom to my business--so highly useful. Moreso than any off the shelf product could hope to be.

by qup

7/12/2026 at 11:53:43 PM

Same experience here. I’m able to grow the business faster for sure.

by jbs789

7/12/2026 at 9:58:49 PM

SaaS is dead.

Everything is going to be brought in house.

by echelon

7/13/2026 at 7:50:55 PM

Not everything, but a lot.

I don't anticipate replacing my payroll company, for instance.

by qup

7/12/2026 at 10:19:34 PM

Until someone will figure out that, according to some spreadsheet, outsourcing it all would result in Big Savings That Would Help The Share Price, and the carousel will start again.

Capitalism will capitalism.

by toyg

7/12/2026 at 7:42:01 PM

I've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.

by apitman

7/12/2026 at 9:11:26 PM

Curious, what have you built? I just wibe coded a packing/checklist app, a llm-powered meal planner and a very specialised app for tracking LAN party network building.

by mrgaro

7/13/2026 at 2:24:44 AM

I vibe coded a battery monitor for my wireless mouse. It doesn't have Linux support and I wanted to know when to charge it.

I built an AllTrails equivalent (iOS app and all). It allows me to scan my backpacking gear to load it into a library (with metadata attached), build a weight profile for my trip, has offline maps, and more. I wanted to make something that was more suited to long backpacking trips and will eventually add itinerary planning. I was originally planning on trying to monetize it but I don't know how to sell software and honestly the QA process is so time consuming (hike, fix bugs, hike more, fix those bugs) that I just gave up. I plan on redeploying it to my homelab since I previously ran it on Hetzner.

by OhSoHumble

7/13/2026 at 4:14:46 AM

That's so cool. I also thought a bit what it would mean to monetise the checklist/packing list app, but I just don't see much business case with it, with all the QA and support requirements.

by mrgaro

7/13/2026 at 4:25:40 AM

Well, the monetization would be that you would have to have a subscription to use it over a long term - similar to AllTrails. Checklisting/packing/gear tracking was one dimension. The other dimensions would be curated backpacking routes and AI analysis of whether or not you were prepared for your trip.

The idea would be that you would scan all of your gear in and then create a map (or select one) and then Gemini would tell you whether or not you were prepared for that trip - does your sleeping bag insulate well enough, do you have the right shoes, etc. You could even do neat tricks like calculate expected route completing time based on assumed weight. I was also planning a "ask a human" feature that would snapshot all that data and post it to an internal forum.

Ultimately though, outdoor people hate AI (understandably). Selling it as "AI powered" is a no-go.

And I genuinely do not understand how to distribute software. Getting people to use your software is extremely hard unless it is very polished and has no bugs. The feature set was too similar to AllTrails so people will expect AllTrails quality. And something that I'm struggling with for all software that I make is I don't know how to get beta testers to get a better feedback loop. Going "hey my software isn't perfect but can you try it out and let me know what you think" is genuinely met with disdain for bothering the person, apathy, blank stares, or whatever. Doesn't really matter if it's offered for free or not - or even if the person expressed a desire for a solution. A person can say "wow that is a great idea I would love to try that" and I would follow up with them with practically no success.

At the end of the day I think I just want to give up and go back to big tech and optimize ad distribution pipelines to deliver weight loss ads to children or whatever tech is up to these days.

by OhSoHumble

7/12/2026 at 6:51:30 PM

This may have been true six months ago, but I doubt it holds water today.

by stronglikedan

7/12/2026 at 4:46:54 PM

Only if you're working on a client consulting model perhaps, and not even then necessarily. There are lots of reports of vibe coded apps not holding up in production so they should be treated as prototypes. It's similar to the outsourcing trend where people reverted back to using in house talent once they realized how terrible most of the produced software was. The only difference is AI models get better but it remains to be seen if they can get to such an end to end stage that they can autonomously deploy to prod and diagnose any issues without human intervention. There have been some paths to that but I haven't seen it end to end yet.

by satvikpendem

7/12/2026 at 5:25:56 PM

Most of the stuff demoed on r/vibecoding are trivial programs, and they’re often buggy and full of holes. If that’s the type of software you produce then yes, you’ll probably be impacted. Thankfully that isn’t the majority of software.

It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it.

by slopinthebag

7/13/2026 at 12:02:27 AM

> It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it.

I don’t know how it is all around the world but where I live, the photography is part of the whole packaged wedding plan and there’s no choice/option BUT to use one, guaranteeing their (expensive) service and job, regardless of what people can produce on their own.

OTOH, it’s probably better to have someone neutral there who can take pics rather than eat/drink/cry and whatever else people do at weddings ;)

by weikju

7/13/2026 at 1:17:33 AM

So I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a prosumer canon Digital Rebel SLR that I mostly used to do wildlife photography, and some good quality lenses. It took me a good 40 hours to generate the final output in photoshop out of the couple of thousand photos I took. Based on what we produced on the first one I've been asked to shoot 3 additional weddings by friends, none of them large, involved productions, using better equipment.

The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.

by skipkey

7/12/2026 at 5:48:45 PM

Personal software is the future and a person building software for themselves tends to withstand enshittifcation. That's why I love when people open-source projects they love and are passionate about and I will always choose them over proprietary ones.

People always argue "well, Slack and Notion have distribution and the product isn't everything." Ok and? The person making it for themselves doesn't necessarily need distribution for it to be valuable. In fact, it's even more attractive that way.

by theturtletalks

7/12/2026 at 7:20:17 PM

Basic economics still holds. There will be firms investing loads of time and money into specific, winning approaches and folks using custom builds will be competed away by them.

by piker

7/12/2026 at 9:34:33 PM

Those firms investing time and money may make a good product at first, but it will slowly get worse as they try to recoup their costs and make a profit. The person making the open-source alternative may do the same, but I can fork it and go on my merry way if they do.

by theturtletalks

7/12/2026 at 11:47:13 PM

We thought it would level us all up to equal the best of us, but instead it has leveled them down to within our reach.

by clickety_clack

7/12/2026 at 5:19:15 PM

[dead]

by LastTrain

7/12/2026 at 2:58:07 PM

There is infinite latent demand for software, most especially outside the traditionally software-focused spaces. If LLMs stopped improving today it would take us 10 years to catch up to the new software-writing abilities that have become available. This is a great illustration of that fact.

by semiquaver

7/12/2026 at 12:04:00 PM

Nice balanced perspective there at the end:

"as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable."

It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.

by wffurr

7/12/2026 at 3:05:05 PM

> It’s a tool. Good for some things but not for others and generally not to be trusted.

I agree completely you always need to check the work of LLM agents, but it does strike me as a tiny bit funny to anthropomorphize AI by using ‘trust’ while warning against anthropomorphizing the AI by using unchecked output. ;) Generally speaking, “trust” in AI has been going up very quickly as the models & harnesses improve, and as people figure out effective workflows.

I trust my hammer with nails but not screws… does that mean the hammer should generally not be trusted? The problem with AI is we don’t know the difference between nails and screws. (This may be where my analogy breaks down. :P) But I feel like saying don’t trust it isn’t as helpful as saying something like you should expect to spend more time planning and iterating than before, and you should expect tot spend more time reviewing and checking output than before, and learn how to use skills and context and subagents, and learn to use AI on some non-production low-consequence projects first. Saying ‘generally not to be trusted’ implicitly suggests not using AI, and doesn’t leave the reader with how to use AI. The goal is to build trust by building good workflows and by understanding what works well and what doesn’t, right?

by dahart

7/12/2026 at 4:28:51 PM

"I trust my hammer with nails but not screws… does that mean the hammer should generally not be trusted?"

I trust a hammer to be able to hit a nail, without breaking. But if the hammer is old and the wood brittle, I don't trust it anymore.

Using it for anything else (screws) has nothing to do with trust, but using the wrong tool.

by lukan

7/13/2026 at 2:10:47 PM

I don't see how "trust" is anthropomorphizing. Do I trust this bridge to hold my weight? Do I trust that this tool in my hand will perform as expected?

by wffurr

7/12/2026 at 3:32:50 PM

I don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.

by falcor84

7/12/2026 at 7:06:51 PM

It’s quite clear from the blog post that LLM was used for something that was:

- nice to have but clearly not important enough to invest time in

- definitely not worthwhile paying someone to do

- not going to hurt anything or anyone if it wasn’t implemented as close to what was envisioned.

If you read between the lines then trust may also mean privacy, if you’re furthering the goal of some company that may be stealing your data for training even when they say they are not because there are legal loopholes that allows them to get away with it, etc.

Your example of hiring Donald Knuth to write your code doesn’t fit into what’s being said about trust either. If you were never going to trust anyone to write your code, it doesn’t matter who it is anyway.

For most of us, even if we are engineers, chances are hiring someone legendarily good at writing code to requirement will produce far better results than what we knew we could achieve.

I would trust someone who is that good to write the code — more than myself — to do things I want to do it better than I can while being able to catch all the things that didn’t realize I needed.

by throwaway20xdl1

7/12/2026 at 4:14:00 PM

You could trust it to be probably correct but he wouldn’t have tried compiling it.

by dhosek

7/13/2026 at 2:09:27 PM

"Trust" - what level of review does the output need to meet your standards of correctness?

Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output.

by wffurr

7/14/2026 at 9:43:14 AM

> Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output.

Just to nitpick - will it actually? I don't know what your relationship with Donald Knuth is, but to the extent I'm familiar with him and his approach to work, I would expect that even if I could afford him, I would not be able to get him to agree to accept my coding standards, whereas I found that LLMs (although flawed in many ways) can be cajoled relatively effectively to adopt my particular standards.

by falcor84

7/12/2026 at 1:54:51 PM

> and generally not to be trusted

There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are

by an0malous

7/12/2026 at 2:50:18 PM

I mean just from the above quote it’s clear he doesn’t trust them for “mission-critical” tasks. And I doubt LLms have evolved significantly from their stochastic parrot nature over the last few years

by mxkopy

7/12/2026 at 2:40:08 PM

Statistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.

by irishcoffee

7/12/2026 at 3:03:48 PM

This is like saying humans are a self contained electron transport system, nothing special or advanced about that, just a scaled up nematode.

by CuriouslyC

7/12/2026 at 3:31:53 PM

The same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?

by abecedarius

7/12/2026 at 4:49:20 PM

They never will, because it seems to be a psychological effect among humans via the AI effect (see my sibling comment).

by satvikpendem

7/12/2026 at 4:48:29 PM

[dead]

by satvikpendem

7/12/2026 at 4:20:33 PM

Indeed. LLMs produce truly atrocious code, unmaintainable and unreliable. If you're vibecoding a toy to amuse yourself or something similar low-stakes, that's perfectly fine! For higher-stakes code, it's definitely not.

by andrepd

7/12/2026 at 3:03:52 PM

Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.

by luciana1u

7/12/2026 at 3:41:15 PM

I liked this article about an old recipe book and what cooking could have looked like if we took microwave cooking seriously: https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav...

by tux3

7/12/2026 at 4:05:50 PM

This is one of my favorite pieces of internet writing, up there with the SR-71 speed check and the Story of Mel. Every time I see it, I have to read it again and end up giggling through the whole thing.

by AlotOfReading

7/12/2026 at 7:06:27 PM

Wow. That article totally sucked me in!

by arcanemachiner

7/12/2026 at 4:47:03 PM

here you go, Michelin-starred chef:

> Marco Pierre White passionately defends chefs using microwaves. White dubbed microwaves “sensational things” and revealed he thinks they’re far better at preparing kippers than any other technique, like boiling or grilling

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/marco-pierre-white-...

And another one:

> José Andrés, a renowned Michelin-starred chef, New York Times bestselling author and internationally recognized humanitarian. He listed the microwave omelet as his number one foolproof dish and called it the “best fluffy omelet in the history of mankind!”

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/jose-andres-microwave-om...

by not-a-llm

7/12/2026 at 5:50:19 PM

The comment specifically said "microwave dinners." That's frozen meals you just heat up in the microwave.

by tgv

7/12/2026 at 5:59:39 PM

A microwave omelet is almost the same way, especially to a chef, many of which are very pretentious about their eggs.

by wyre

7/12/2026 at 4:19:25 PM

A more accurate analogy is Charles and Henry Greene using tech to construct an intricate rig to fasten the joints in a delicate jewelry box to fit inside the Gamble House. Yes, they could make the rig by hand, but time is a precious resource to people with so much to build.

What Tao and other artists of his caliber are demonstrating is that the tech is capable of building the rig. And the machine makers are incrementally demonstrating that the machine can make not only the jewelry box rig, but rigs to build rig-making machines.

by harrylove

7/12/2026 at 3:27:58 PM

This makes me curious.

Are there any documented essays or reactions from the great chefs of back in the day reacting to the first microwave dinners?

by ViktorRay

7/12/2026 at 3:08:22 PM

i'd imagine when microwaves first came out chefs were genuinely excited? it's pretty insanely magical to observe ... at first.

by thejazzman

7/12/2026 at 3:10:47 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually more common than one might think

by r_lee

7/12/2026 at 3:25:55 PM

People are so confident that this just-a-tool will hit its limits any day now...

by red75prime

7/12/2026 at 3:53:50 PM

People are so confident that this not-just-a-tool will show signs of ASI/AGI any day now...

by nozzlegear

7/12/2026 at 5:03:01 PM

Yep, I'm fairly certain that general learning algorithms acting upon an ANN (which is fairly general too, see the universal approximation theorem) can reach and surpass performance of the human brain. As we have approximately zero evidence that the human brain contains "magic," that is something that can't be modeled by an ANN of a practically feasible size. (I know about chaotic processes that can't be modeled precisely. The "magic" here would be the brain using such a process to make useful decisions. "Useful" not in a sense of a mixed strategiy. You can roll dice to do that.)

But, no, it's not "any day now." The required size and structure of the ANN is to be determined.

by red75prime

7/12/2026 at 10:16:33 PM

I think it's a giant leap of faith to go from "there's no evidence that the human brain contains magic" to "ANNs will achieve AGI and we just need to monkey with the parameters to get there." You've ruled out the supernatural, but don't account for mundane limitations like energy, training data, memory or the architecture. That theorem you referenced tells us a sufficiently wide network can (quoting from Wikipedia) "approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of accuracy" – but it doesn't give us any bound on the sample complexity or the energy required. That is to say, just because the theorem says it's technically possible doesn't mean it's literally possible.

by nozzlegear

7/13/2026 at 2:37:41 AM

From my POV it's "we haven't found physical processes that allow to do information processing, which is relevant to learning, exponentially faster than digital computers and we aren't likely to find them in the brain."

Or, at least, I don't tend to postulate existence of such mechanisms in the brain after hearing about every empirical ANN deficiency.

BTW, I'm not talking about supernatural. The "magic" could be unknown physical processes, unknown quantum algorithms, unknown physics.

by red75prime

7/12/2026 at 6:25:37 PM

I thought the narrative a few months ago was that we had AGI[1]? What happened? It's not like these trillion dollar companies would have an interest in using AGI to hype up their technologies that they would need to replace a percentage of the global workforce over the next few years to justify their current valuations?

/s

[1]https://sequoiacap.com/article/2026-this-is-agi/

by wyre

7/12/2026 at 5:21:20 PM

Ferran Adrià published a recipe for an omelette using potato chips.

by egl2020

7/12/2026 at 3:42:48 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

7/12/2026 at 3:00:20 PM

Running legacy educational Java applets, especially around math and physics, has been a longstanding popular use case of our CheerpJ Applet Runner extension, running Java bytecode in the browser via WebAssembly.

I am not sure how to feel about agents solving the problem via proper modernization. It's certainly positive that students will be able to interact with this content in a modern and more accessible way, but the educational use case for our product, although not commercially important, has always been a source of pride.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cheerpj-applet-runn...

by apignotti

7/12/2026 at 1:05:18 PM

I always enjoy these "domain expert has fun using AI to do something in their domain" articles. But it's always a hobby project, never something serious.

by alansaber

7/12/2026 at 1:42:14 PM

What makes this a hobby project? He’s a university professor so developing teaching material is part of his job.

by jebarker

7/12/2026 at 1:36:40 PM

But he's also using AI for formally verified math and for ideas in solving math problems. The part about it being ok because it is a supplement just means ok that these aren't formally verified and may have bugs, and may also mean ok to not credit the AI for the paper as it is just a visual supplement and not the main work.

by cma

7/12/2026 at 4:22:45 PM

Having started using Claude Code at work, I think coding as we now know it will probably no longer be a career path in 5 years at the outside.

I’m old. If I had to, I could retire tomorrow, albeit on a restricted budget. But I worry about the younger folks (like my 25-year-old nephew) who haven’t built up the resources to survive without working who are in the field right now. There’s going to be a mega disruption and writing code is going to go the way of calculating square roots by hand or hot metal typesetting. There will still people doing it, but it will very much be a niche endeavor.

by dhosek

7/12/2026 at 5:53:11 PM

It's a race to retool. If he can retool to an agentic coding environment quickly he will be OK. Might have to build up the skills outside of work if the current job doesn't allow for it, but I'm less worried about younger people realigning quickly. They're used to it, and younger people are so much more resilient/used to disappointment than we are (economic prospects have been so fucked for Zoomers for so long by so many "once in a lifetime" events and they still soldier on which is a huge testament to them).

Whether reviewing agentic code rather than writing it is a job he wants to do... Different question.

Its older people who can't or won't retool that are going to find that in the game of musical layoff chairs they won't have a chair left when the music stops (and some I've met haven't really internalized that they're even part of the game...)

by cflewis

7/13/2026 at 2:48:57 AM

The rest of my 6-person team (ranging in age from 20s to late 50s maybe early 60s) has been very reluctant to embrace AI despite the push from our manager to do so. I was very much on their side initially, but creating a few little tools to ease some of my burdens sold me on the possibilities. It does feel like cheating and I have to admit that for one of the tools I built,¹ I haven’t even looked at the code, but rather did a few rounds of back and forth with Claude to make the thing do what I needed and to address bugs that showed up as a result of putting it through some real-world usage.

⸻

1. A Mac menu-bar app to make it easier to know when I need to either do a PR or look at someone’s feedback on my own PR. Clicking the icon shows a list of all open PRs that I’ve created or that my review has been requested on (and clicking an item there will open the PR so I can act on it). If there’s a PR that I’ve not left comments on or approved, or if there are unreplied/unclosed comments on my PR or it’s been approved, a badge is added to the menu bar icon.

by dhosek

7/12/2026 at 3:16:28 PM

> always a hobby project, never something serious.

I don’t know what you’re reading, but always and never are strong words. I’ll predict by this time next year you’ll have seen some pretty serious AI uses, and can no longer say always/never. Widespread use of AI coding is brand new, and the models only just barely got good enough to do serious things. It’s way too early to be using words like always and never, but FWIW I’ve already seen some serious uses. There are good reasons personal blog posts rarely talk about ‘serious’ production code; it may be against organizational policy, it may involve code that isn’t’ public, it may reveal proprietary information, and more…

by dahart

7/12/2026 at 1:38:52 PM

Serious things tend to be long and tedious and potentially full of proprietary information.

by dboreham

7/12/2026 at 5:57:33 PM

Open science has plenty of long and tedious articles.

by lanstin

7/12/2026 at 2:57:36 PM

That is how it starts, trust is built on hobby projects.

by indymike

7/12/2026 at 3:41:17 PM

What do you mean not serious? He’s developing visual aids to teach students and to accompany his mathematical research papers. Also, not in this post, he’s been actively using LLMs to do real math research, that is, to prove theorems and solve problems.

Teaching, research and publication are the core activities of his job as a math professor. How does it get more serious than this?

by articulatepang

7/12/2026 at 12:21:59 PM

The article's awkward opening statement proves it wasn't written by AI.

I have been interested in machine-assisted ways to do and teach mathematics from as far back as 1999, when I started coding several applets in Java 1.0, both for my complex analysis and linear algebra courses, to visualize various mathematical objects I was interested in (such as honeycombs or Besicovitch sets).

by muragekibicho

7/12/2026 at 1:39:49 PM

It’s very much Terrence Tao style. His style is having long sentences that could have been broken down into shorter sentences but he chose not to. It doesn’t really affect reading comprehension.

by kccqzy

7/12/2026 at 3:12:56 PM

i would take this every single time over some Claude rewrite slop

by r_lee

7/12/2026 at 6:37:57 PM

I laughed at this "but the code complexity became too much for me, and I abandoned the project." even Terry Tao finds some code too complex to write.

Really bullish on LLMs expanding code development by a very large group of people who are really smart in some domain but could not get into 'coding'.

by npalli

7/12/2026 at 1:13:44 PM

Using LLMs to generate dashboards is probably their most productive use case

by vatsachak

7/12/2026 at 5:59:08 PM

And then to write installers so your coworkers who aren’t liking instructions like “then make a gpg key and install pinentry-mac” can use the extremely useful vibe coded dashboards to make the prod site transparent and viewable, digestible to eyes.

by lanstin

7/12/2026 at 7:56:21 PM

I don't think it's dashboards specifically, I think it's things that require a relatively small amount of code that fits in the context window and is easy to iterate on using natural language.

by apitman

7/12/2026 at 4:56:48 PM

It's probably a matter of short time until it's possible to disassemble any sophisticated software, rewrite it entirely with better features and usability, generate all needed artifacts, port to any platform. The only moat left is probably remote massive data storage. So if you want to replicate YouTube or TikTok, it's not impossible, but requires a lot more hardware assets than say anything that runs entirely locally (like operating systems or most video games).

by novaRom

7/12/2026 at 5:59:13 PM

How exactly do you envision this ? you will ask the ai to make youtube but better, people seperate the "what" from the "how" but they have a very complex relationship

by lacedeconstruct

7/12/2026 at 8:19:31 PM

Have you tried most powerful recent models? You may even don't understand at all "how" - what you get is end result you asked for, verified and tested. I am pretty sure if I can vibe code quite non trivial solution in just say 4-8 hours today, then why will it be impossible say in a year or two to vibe code something at the level of most sophisticated apps and services today? Pretty reasonable expectation taking into account what was possible just a year ago and what you can make today without even understanding "how".

by novaRom

7/13/2026 at 1:35:23 AM

> then why will it be impossible say in a year or two to vibe code something at the level of most sophisticated apps and services today?

Replace "vibe coding" with "outsource to India" and it's the same situation we were in 20 years ago: I remember around the time when YouTube had well-established itself (2009-ish?) and so a cottage-industry mushroomed all selling visual-lookalike YouTube clones, but implemented as monolithic single PHP project or WordPress plugin, using the local filesystem for video file storage (or worse: Base64-encoded text in MySQL, lovely).

...to someone with no prior experience or knowledge how highly-scalable, Google-tier web applications (like the real YouTube) work or are built, these "Me-Too-Tube" sites were indistinguishable from the real thing and as far as they were concerned they were happy with it.

Never mind that even if those $25 scripted websites were ever actually scalable, it isn't enough to simply have a video-sharing site; you need to get millions of people to decide to start using it - and that's something which will elude Claude's abilities... possibly forever, I feel.

by DaiPlusPlus

7/12/2026 at 1:04:49 PM

I am far from a mathematician but I am excited by the possibilities of using AI for generating more math. Math in my mind exists purely in the world of forms, and cannot be appropriated for profit, but is downstream to everything else. I am keen to see what this enables.

by koe123

7/12/2026 at 2:32:50 PM

It may be a question of perspective, but in my mind mathematics is upstream to everything else, including physics, biology, etc. And it doesn't just exist in the human mind or the "world of forms", as in Platon's realm of ideas. It's more fundamental than that, closer to the foundation from which all existence emerges. Our reality is like a shadow of a shadow, a fleeting illusion, compared to the eternal reality that gives birth to all lesser realities.

As for profit, there's a reason why governments and AI companies are hiring philosophers and mathematicians. It's not to make the world a better place for everyone, or to encourage the progress of human knowledge; but to gain cutting-edge advantages over their competitors. Same reason why theoretical physicists were prized before/during the Second World War.

by lioeters

7/12/2026 at 4:46:05 PM

Interesting point, I think you are right about it being upstream!

by koe123

7/15/2026 at 7:52:36 AM

[flagged]

by tough

7/12/2026 at 6:09:56 PM

I have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations research, insurance companies, logistics, all can hire a lot of them. As a software engineer with a math degree, I find that some of software is like math, but not very often like research math and relatively few of my colleagues have math degrees.

by lanstin

7/12/2026 at 5:01:59 PM

I wonder if LLMs modify their output when they realize they are interacting with a famous person.

By famous I mean someone whose biography is in the training data. All models know a lot more about Terrance Tao than they know about me, when he's working on his projects do the models know they don't need to explain "Besicovitch sets".

Since the system prompt likely includes something about not insulting the user, does the LLM modify it's responses if it realizes it's talking to famous politician, like "dont mention the time $politician was cancelled".

by botro

7/12/2026 at 7:59:23 PM

You could test this by starting your sessions with "I am Terrance Tao"

by apitman

7/12/2026 at 10:15:49 PM

Yes. I am NOT famous. But I am in the corpus. In my GPT3 beta tests, I asked it to be first Bill Bradley then Noam Chomski, (a parlor trick that's harder today due to RL), and Bill tried to butter me up based on some work history of mine. Chomsky then said "Man, I hate that guy."

by vessenes

7/12/2026 at 3:20:16 PM

even though there's still a lot of work to push things over the finish line, i have enjoyed how much it has reduced the activation energy for starting and finishing "one of these days..." projects!

by a-dub

7/12/2026 at 1:27:58 PM

His website using mathematical knowledge is refreshing. There's a small UI bug, but personally, I wish more educational materials were this rich in audiovisual content.

by jdw64

7/13/2026 at 12:49:00 AM

Interesting perspective. One thing I'm curious about is whether modern coding agents are actually better at maintaining older codebases than greenfield projects. In my experience, legacy code often lacks the context that agents need.

by redfather918

7/12/2026 at 6:00:14 PM

Using Fable with Anthropic Design skill works every time.

by ashu0x

7/13/2026 at 12:30:22 AM

JavaScript: Good Enough for Terry Tao

by jacobedawson

7/12/2026 at 3:39:16 PM

This is amazing!

by mikkolaakkonen

7/13/2026 at 10:17:25 AM

Nice write-up!

by cvanelteren

7/12/2026 at 6:42:44 PM

Nice

by kyleclouthier

7/12/2026 at 12:48:58 PM

[flagged]

by chumzygood

7/12/2026 at 8:12:26 PM

[flagged]

by guillaume_code

7/13/2026 at 12:07:58 AM

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by ahdgs

7/12/2026 at 12:02:44 PM

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by pizzaballs

7/12/2026 at 2:40:36 PM

[flagged]

by onionsential

7/12/2026 at 1:52:34 PM

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by haebom

7/12/2026 at 12:09:23 PM

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by geeewhy

7/12/2026 at 12:34:46 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

7/13/2026 at 11:56:12 PM

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by fatmacelik6894

7/12/2026 at 12:31:51 PM

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by 484994949595

7/12/2026 at 1:22:26 PM

LLM will do very good job in pure mathematics since it don't need the senses to logically understand/conclude a given topic.

by suwapat

7/12/2026 at 12:14:37 PM

The more Terry talks about AI, the more I'm starting to feel like Terry may have some undisclosed conflicts of interest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1tryyw7/terenc...

by jgalt212

7/12/2026 at 12:25:58 PM

When it comes to coding, non-programmers do not have to be in a defensive position worried that their job is under risk, instead they just see a great tool that saves them time, especially doing boring coding like dashboards, visualizations, interactive web-pages, or doing experiments that they otherwise would not have time for.

by sega_sai

7/12/2026 at 12:37:53 PM

A lot of mathematicians are worried: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/mathematicians-w...

by simonw

7/12/2026 at 12:42:26 PM

Mathematicians are a kind of programmers, the original ones.

by jdright

7/12/2026 at 1:06:50 PM

Why are mathematicians a kind of programmers? Besides applied maths, aren't they more researchers that explore and discover, in contrast to the majority of programmers who are more like handymen?

by lagrange77

7/12/2026 at 6:16:47 PM

Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths. Theoretical computer science is maths. A lot of foundations work is programming. Coding itself is like an extended problem set from a maths class. LaTeX itself is programming.

The difference to me is one of directionality - maths research is seeing a far off island and getting there by hook or by crook; bridge, draining the swamp, inventing an airplane or boat, whatever it takes. Software engineering is like covering a plain with tiles - every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.

by lanstin

7/12/2026 at 7:40:01 PM

> Metamathematics, by Kleene, is programming in maths.

Ookay.

Back in the day i was confused by 'Linear programming', which is optimisation and has nothing to do with coding.

> every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.

Right. I would say Mathematics tries to unobscure (patterns in) nature. Engineering is creating tools, sometimes leveraging natural patterns. But yeah, Fourier or Laplace definitely created tools, too.

by lagrange77

7/13/2026 at 3:13:45 AM

The * in regular expressions is from that book by Kleene; it used to be called the Kleene star. And the book is all building up the apparatus of functional programs, recursion, implementations of arithmetic and logic, etc. it is a great book for programmers. But it is for basic computability theory, the Gödel incompleteness theorem, results on regular languages and so on.

by lanstin

7/13/2026 at 5:00:26 PM

Interesting.

Yes, functional programming feels a lot more mathy than procedural or OOP.

by lagrange77

7/12/2026 at 3:06:55 PM

Disagree. Programming is about sequences (behavior, state, data, etc), math is about relations.

by CuriouslyC

7/12/2026 at 12:49:22 PM

"When it comes to a field I'm not an expert in, AI is a great tool."

Every time.

by lowsong

7/12/2026 at 1:34:14 PM

Tao is not an expert in math research? That's a really high bar then.

by azan_

7/12/2026 at 1:02:35 PM

Yes, because AI gets the "shape" of something right. If you don't know the field you don't notice the pockmarked surface.

by alansaber

7/12/2026 at 1:08:40 PM

I think the opposite is true.

by lagrange77

7/12/2026 at 1:29:05 PM

So does anyone familiar with the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

by wizzwizz4

7/12/2026 at 1:30:40 PM

[dead]

by perching_aix

7/12/2026 at 12:29:04 PM

[dead]

by hansmayer

7/12/2026 at 12:16:06 PM

Or he just finds it an incredible time-saving tool to help him do more maths.

by nmfisher

7/12/2026 at 12:22:46 PM

The well-known shadowy bias and conflict of interest of "I just enjoy experimenting with this new thing".

by perching_aix

7/12/2026 at 12:27:46 PM

[dead]

by hansmayer